Recent changes in the tax laws have placed a premium on keeping accurate records of car mileage for business purposes in order to properly support a taxable deduction for business use of the car. As a minimum, such record-keeping should include destination, mileage or distance traveled, nature or purpose of the trip as well as date when trip was made. People who have to keep such records either forget, or are in a hurry and do not make the effort or expend the time to write such information down after each trip. As a result, when income tax time comes they lack the proper records to support a tax deduction and have either forgotten most of the details and are forced to guess at or to make up records. Their records are therefore inaccurate, incomplete and very likely would not support their claim for a deduction if audited.
It is therefore proposed as a solution to the foregoing problem to devise a system which will prompt the vehicle operator at the beginning and end of each trip to record the necessary information relating to that trip for tax purposes, and which further provides an easy and convenient means for accurately recording such information at the beginning and end of each trip. Preferably, this is carried out without the use of sophisticated or expensive equipment and obviates the time-consuming task of writing down mileage information before and after each trip. In this relation, it is desirable that the prompts or information to be recorded be done by means of pre-recorded messages, the message player being automatically activated at the beginning and end of each trip or journey; and further that the information recorded is synchronized with the message prompter to record the operator's verbal responses to the information requested.
In the past, systems which have been devised for recording vehicle mileage or other information have required that the vehicle operator remember to operate the recorder and does not automatically respond to starting and stopping of the vehicle to prompt the operator to record the necessary information. Moreover, systems of the type devised in the past have been fairly sophisticated requiring use of microprocessors with computer programs as well as the use of the keyboard to be manually operated, and representative patents are U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,677,429 to R. W. Glotzbach, 4,685,061 to C. D. Whitaker and 4,834,546 to W. L. Keller. Other patents of general interest in this field are U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,792,445 to R. M. Bucks et al, 4,067,061 to J. E. Juhasz, 4,334,248 to N. P. Maiocco, 4,644,368 to G. Mutz, 4,853,856 to J. R. Hanway, 4,858,133 to K. Takeuchi et al and 4,933,852 to J. H. Lemelson.